How To Make Jaiva Mayonnaise (All You Need To Know) (2024)

Jaiva mayonnaise is a delicious meal to have on a warm evening, gathered by friends and family. It is a cold meal that will leave you feeling refreshed but still full, enjoying the freshness of the salad and meat.

Today we’re looking into how you can make Jaiva mayonnaise at home, so that you can serve it to your friends and family.

What Is Jaiva?

Jaiva is a salad made with imitation crab, broken apart into small pieces and mixed together with the salad. Then it is often served with plenty of lime juice to give it a zingy taste.

The interesting thing about jaiva is that it uses zero real crab meat, meaning that vegetarians and vegans can also enjoy it. While ceviche will use raw fish or seafood in its recipes, jaiva will use an imitation meat instead.

In other words, jaiva is very similar to a crab salad. All you will need to do is remove the real seafood meat from the recipe and replace it with an imitation crab!

What Is In Jaiva?

There are many different variations of jaiva, and the beauty of this dish is that you can often make it to your own taste without compromising the recipe.

For example, you can add any salad ingredients that you want to within the meal – don’t like celery? Swap it out for lettuce! Not a fan of lime juice? How about lemon!

With that being said, here is a list of the most commonly used ingredients within jaiva recipes online.

• Imitation crab
• Red onion
• Celery
• Celery leaves
• Lime juice
• Mayonnaise
• Cilantro
• Chives
• Garlic
• Black pepper

However, you can feel free to add in as much or as little as you want to make your salad your own.

Jaiva is then commonly served with crackers, bread, or tostados. This gives your jaiva a base, making it easier to eat and even more delicious.

Making Jaiva Mayonnaise

Jaiva Mayonnaise is incredibly easy to do, and it won’t take long to finish at all. We like making this on days where we would much rather be doing anything else but cooking, and the bonus is that it can be used the next day too!

All you’re going to need is your favorite salad ingredients, herbs and spices, some imitation crab, and mayonnaise.

Now that you have all of your ingredients, let’s go through each of the steps on how to make your own Jaiva mayonnaise!

Step One: Shredding The Meat

This is perhaps the longest part of making your jaiva mayonnaise, as you want to make the pieces small enough that they blend well with the salad. Having large chunks of imitation crab within your jaiva mayonnaise might leave it too fishy.

Imitation crab often comes in two forms – chunk style and flake style. The latter will be easier to use for shredding the meat, although you can do the same with chunk style – it just might take a little longer to achieve the smaller pieces.

For our jaiva mayonnaise, we always use flake style. Take the block in your hands and shred it into smaller pieces. Now take a knife to it and cut it up into even smaller pieces. This will help achieve the shredded look and feel to the meat.

You don’t have to use a knife to make the pieces even smaller, but we like to use pieces of meat as small as we can get them. Place the meat in a large bowl and set aside.

Step Two: Preparing Your Salad

Now you’re going to need to prepare all of your salad ingredients the way that you like them. For jaiva mayonnaise, however, we would always recommend chopping the ingredients finely so that they blend with the shredded imitation crab.

For our jaiva mayonnaise salad, we use red onion and celery as the base. These ingredients can be finely chopped into small sections and blended together with the crab imitation meat. Add all three ingredients into the bowl and mix.

Now we chop the cilantro and celery leaves as well, and into the bowl they go. As these ingredients are thinner, they do not need to be chopped as finely as the others.

How you want to prepare them is up to you – some people prefer them chopped into tiny pieces while others like larger pieces.

Step Three: Season Your Mixture

Now that you have a nice blended salad in your bowl, you can season it to taste. We used dr23ied chives, old bay seasoning, garlic salt, and black pepper. Mix all of your seasonings into the bowl well so that everything is well combined.

Now you can add your lime juice, which will give the jaiva mayonnaise a delicious refreshing taste. Again, mix well to ensure that everything gets a touch of lime.

Step Four: Add The Mayonnaise

The final ingredient is the mayonnaise, which is going to leave your salad with a creamy texture. The mayonnaise pairs amazingly well with the imitation crab, as well as all of the salad ingredients and spices.

It clashes with the lime juice, but in a tasty way rather than a sour one. These two strong tastes juxtapose one another to give you a multidimensional taste with every bite.

Add your mayonnaise and stir with a big spoon, ensuring that everything is well coated with mayonnaise. And there you have it – your very own jaiva mayonnaise! Serve with tostadas, crackers, bread, or even on its own – and enjoy!

What Does Jaiva Mayonnaise Taste Like?

jaiva mayonnaise tastes just like a crab salad, with strong seafood flavors within a creamy mayonnaise sauce. The lime juice adds a zesty finish while the salad ingredients are used to leave you feeling refreshed.

The taste of your jaiva mayonnaise will depend largely on the ingredients you use and the spices you pair with them.

Some people like to add chili flakes to their jaiva mayonnaise to give it an extra kick, and this would taste lovely with the lime juice already added.

Depending on the imitation crab you use, you could be left with a stronger or weaker seafood flavor to your jaiva mayonnaise. Some imitation crab is higher quality than others, making it taste more like crab than others.

So, the taste of your jaiva mayonnaise often depends on the type of imitation crab that you use.

Another thing that might affect the taste of your jaiva mayonnaise is what you serve it with. Some people use it as a sandwich filling while others use it as a dip for crackers. Once you try it for the first time, though, you’ll be making it to use with everything!

Summary

We hope that you have enjoyed our article on jaiva mayonnaise and how you can make it for yourself.

Just make sure that you have some high quality imitation crab to use to ensure that the taste is as similar as the real thing as possible.

Simply mix this with finely chopped salad, all of the seasoning that you want, some lime juice, and lots of mayonnaise! Keep the leftovers refrigerated to use the following day – if you have any!